Tuesday, June 26, 2012

The Third Man

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo - Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance...In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce?...The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly. [Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man]

Many films deserve only a single viewing, if that; others only two or three unless you are introducing a pleasure to someone else. The Third Man is one of those I can watch over and over. Shmuel Ben-Gad introduces and comments on the film here:

The Third Man (1949) is a very interesting collaboration of director Carol Reed, screenwriter Graham Greene, and actor Orson Welles. Greene did not want to write a screenplay directly but rather first wrote a novella from which he then wrote the screenplay. With the zither music of Anton Karas as background, the film tells of Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), an American writer of pulp westerns, who comes to post-Second World War Vienna to work for his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) whom he has not seen for nine or ten years. Martins finds that Lime was killed by a truck and attends his funeral but the circumstances of his death seem strange. Two men supposedly carried his body after he was killed by a car, but a mysterious third man was also seen. .... [more]

Standfast:

[Honest said] "I thought we had an honest man upon the road...."
"If you thought not amiss," said Standfast, "how happy am I! But if I be not as I should, ‘tis I alone must bear it."(John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress)